Volume 44 | Number 2 Article 8

10-2016 Experiences with Campus Digital Photographs @ MSU Archives Ed Busch Michigan State University, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Busch, Ed (2016) "Experiences with Campus Digital Photographs @ MSU Archives," MAC Newsletter: Vol. 44 : No. 2 , Article 8. Available at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/macnewsletter/vol44/iss2/8

This Mixed Media is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in MAC Newsletter by an authorized editor of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Mixed Media: Working with Audio and Visual Materials

Assistant Editor: Heather Fox, University of Louisville. Contact Heather at [email protected] if you would like to guest author a column or have a good idea to share. Experiences with Campus Digital Photographs @ MSU Archives By Ed Busch, Michigan State University Since coming to Michigan State University (MSU) various storage types and file formats. We had already set Archives and working with born-digital photographs, I up 3½" and 5¼" floppy drives. We acquired Zip and Jaz have pursued a number of workflows and tools to improve drives from eBay. Many of the CDs were Kodak Photo processing and to provide access. This short article will CDs, created when rolls of film were processed. Images present some of the experiments and trials I have con- were then scanned by the Kodak film processor at a resolu- ducted with these digital photographs as well as where I tion of 2200dpi and burned to the CD in the PCD file am heading with these trials now. format. Reading these files accurately and completely requires special software. We purchased an application This work first became a focus for me when I processed a called pcdMagic to read them and convert them to Tagged collection of university records from one of the MSU col- Image File Format (TIFF), an uncompressed file format leges during 2008–2009 that included over 400 magnetic frequently selected as the image format for preservation and optical media items, including floppies, CD/DVDs, systems. and Zip and Jaz disks. Floppies can hold from 100K to 1.5 MB of data, while CD/DVDs can hold from 650MB While processing this media, I created a workflow for to 4.7 GB. Iomega Zip and Jaz disks were popular storage their handling that used a spreadsheet as a log for tracking options in the mid- to late 1990s. Zip disks initially stored details about the media. I assigned an identifier to each 100MB but later handled up to 750MB; Jaz disks initially piece of media and then recorded this identifier along with held 1GB, which later increased to 2GB. media type, description (including date), physical location, file location, and accession number in the spreadsheet. At that time, the MSU Archives had neither a policy nor a workflow in place for handling these electronic materi- als, nor all the hardware or software needed to access the (Continued on page 28)

This spreadsheet tracked mixed media types from the College of Human Medicine accession. Image courtesy of Ed Busch.

MAC Newsletter • October 2016 27 MIXED MEDIA—Continued Heather Fox, Assistant Editor Digital Photographs @ MSU (Continued from page 27)

In 2010, the files were virus checked, transferred off of Face detection identified candidates, but took many the media, and stored to a networked storage device (over decisions by me to sort the good from bad matches. For- 42,000 files, 220 GB). At this time, it became important tunately, many of the photo files included names in their to me to find a way to search images to handle requests titles, which helped identify faces. I found ’s facial from, and ideally share images with, creating departments recognition very useful for quickly finding known people and/or to provide an external access method. I was familiar in many photographs. I continued to use Picasa on my with iPhoto on the Mac and needed something to use on desktop to search and access files, but, due to online limita- our office PCs that had common image organizer features tions, I never implemented the public search. Updates by such as thumbnail previews, album creation, tags, and for the Picasa application became less frequent. an access method (export, e-mail, printing, etc.). I was During this time, we conducted ongoing discussions with also looking for something free or inexpensive that was our campus photographers to come up with a workflow easy to install and use (for archivists and the public) to for transferring and managing their photographs. The provide access control. A big plus was facial recognition campus photographers unit transferred DVDs with over and handling functions. 39,000 photographs (665 GB) to the archives. They also Picasa was one of the Google apps I tried. It was free and had many more photographs on local and networked came with 1 GB of online storage for public access. I storage to transfer at a future date. I learned that they selected Picasa primarily for its facial recognition feature were using on their desktops for and its support of Adobe XMP and metada0ta. I was editing and tagging. Completed photos were uploaded very interested in facial recognition and its potential power to their Zenfolio website for public access and purchase. to help identify people in photographs more efficiently. I experimented with Lightroom in our environment, but as it lacked facial recognition, I held off on implementing For my implementation at MSU, I used Picasa’s folder it into our workflow. manager setting to specify folders to scan for updates (new images) and also turned on face detection. Picasa’s face In 2015, the campus photography unit suggested that we detection works by identifying faces in images and then begin using Zenfolio with the thought that they could trying to mark other images with similar characteristics. transfer their account holdings to our account in the future and that we could then download and ingest their content into our preservation environ- ment. They were just beginning to look for a new product, as Zenfolio lacked the robust search functionality that they needed. We signed up for a Zenfolio account and uploaded the contents of their DVDs in our holdings to our Zenfolio account (663 GB). During that year, Adobe also released the first version of Lightroom to include face recognition. After many Google searches and experiments with various tools, I was able to transfer my Picasa data with its facial recognition tags into Lightroom. At least, the metadata transferred in a fashion. Using Lightroom, I worked on Picasa metadata cleanup, experimented with add- ing metadata (keywords and/or captions), and then uploaded to Zenfolio. Some of the This snapshot from Google’s Picasa shows images identified by facial recognition of former dean Andrew Hunt. Image courtesy of Ed Busch. 28 MAC Newsletter • October 2016 MIXED MEDIA—Continued Heather Fox, Assistant Editor keywords were added using Lightroom’s facial recognition. I continued the Zenfolio upload to provide a basic search function for our staff since an access portal for our MSU Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) does not exist yet. For access to the MSU Archives digitized images (scanned images), we have been using a account and an MSU-developed platform, KORA. Flickr is an image- and video-hosting website. KORA is an open source, database- driven, online digital repository application for complex multimedia objects (text, images, audio, video) created by MATRIX at MSU (kora.matrix.msu.edu). We do not currently put our born-digital images on these sites, and our Zenfolio account is currently set to private for internal use only. In the near future, we plan on implementing Zenfolio’s storefront since many of our images are popular with the general public and can generate a nice revenue stream for the archives. So, where does this bring me to now? I am still experi- menting and still need to develop a good workflow for born-digital photographs coming in from campus units and particularly from university photographers. The Hunter Doherty “Patch” Adams attended a College of Human Medicine event in 1998. Image courtesy of Michigan State (Continued on page 30) University Archives and Historical Collections.

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MAC Newsletter • October 2016 29 MIXED MEDIA—Continued Heather Fox, Assistant Editor Digital Photographs @ MSU (Continued from page 29) workflow needs to include processing photographs (weed- raphers are currently looking at digital management tools ing), adding metadata (facial recognition), and preserving such as SmugMug and others. the images in our TDR. Of particular importance is Implementing a solid workflow for the handoff of born- getting a good plan worked out with the university digital photographs between the campus photographers photographers on what they should send to the archives. and the university archives and providing a public access We do not want everything, but what we want is not portal will have a positive impact on our acquisitions. It necessarily what the photographers think is important. will also be a great boon for our outreach program at the The photographers usually focus on the people at an event, MSU Archives. Adding useful keywords by working with while the archivist may also be interested in details around the photographers and using techniques such as facial rec- the people, such as the building interior or exterior. ognition will make access that much easier for researchers, We also need to monitor where the university photogra- the general public, and the archives staff. The MSU Ar- phers are going with their digital asset management tool chives’ digital images, both born digital and digitized, are search and selection. Zenfolio provides a basic search used for many different types of publications (paper and function and does provide a storefront when we are ready digital print, television, public events and lectures, etc.), to go in that direction. It does not provide great organizing providing a great opportunity for showcasing our unique options nor is data entered in Zenfolio available when digital images to the public. I hope to share more at local downloaded (metadata and captions). The MSU photog- and regional conferences as we work through our goals for preserving and sharing our university photographs.

MSU’s “Sparty” mascot with Dean Marsha Rappley at the College of Human Medicine's 40th Anniversary event in 2004. Image courtesy of Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections. 30 MAC Newsletter • October 2016